SoroushVahidi/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Assessment of computer science learning in a scratch-based outreach program
(2013)

Many institutions have created and deployed outreach programs for middle school students with the goal of increasing the number and diversity of students who later pursue careers in computer science. While these programs have been shown to increase interest in computer science, there has been less work on showing whether participants learn computer science content.
 We address two questions, one specific, and the other more general: (1) "What computer science did our middle school students learn in our interdisciplinary two-week summer camp?" (2) "How can computer science concepts be assessed in the context of Scratch-based outreach programs"? We address both questions by presenting the design of our summer camp, an overview of our curriculum, our assessment methodology, and our assessment results.
 Though the sample size is not statistically significant, the results show that a two-week, interdisciplinary, non-academic summer camp can be effective not only for engaging students, but also for imparting CS content. In just two weeks, with a curriculum not entirely focused on computer science, students displayed competence with event-driven programming, initialization of state, message passing, and say/sound synchronization. We have employed assessment methodologies that avoid written exams, an approach both outreach and classroom-based programs may find useful.
Evaluation of Computer Games Developed by Primary School Children to Gauge Understanding of Programming Concepts
(2012)

Under the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) in Scotland, newer approaches such as games-based learning and games-based construction are being adopted to motivate and engage students. Construction of computer games is seen by some to be a highly motivational and practical approach at engaging children at Primary Education (PE) level in computer programming concepts. Gamesbased learning (GBL) and games-based construction both suffer from a dearth of empirical evidence supporting their validity as teaching and learning approaches. To address this issue, this paper will present the findings of observational research at PE level using Scratch as a tool to develop computer games using rudimentary programming concepts. A list of criteria will be compiled for reviewing the implementation of each participant to gauge the level of programming proficiency demonstrated. The study will review 29 games from Primary 4 to Primary 7 level and will present the overall results and results for each individual year. This study will contribute to the empirical evidence in games-based construction by providing the results of observational research across different levels of PE and will provide pedagogical guidelines for assessing programming ability using a games-based construction approach.
Computational thinking
(2011)

omputational thinking builds on the power and limits of computing processes, whether they are executed by a human or by a machine. Computational methods and models give us the courage to solve problems and design systems that no one of us would be capable of tackling alone. Computational thinking confronts the riddle of machine intelligence: What can humans do better than computers? And What can computers do better than humans? Most fundamentally it addresses the question: What is computable? Today, we know only parts of the answers to such questions.
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
(1994)

Design Patterns is a modern classic in the literature of object-oriented development, offering timeless and elegant solutions to common problems in software design. It describes patterns for managing object creation, composing objects into larger structures, and coordinating control flow between objects. The book provides numerous examples where using composition rather than inheritance can improve the reusability and flexibility of code. Note, though, that its not a tutorial but a catalog that you can use to find an object-oriented design pattern thats appropriate for the needs of your particular application--a selection for virtuoso programmers who appreciate (or require) consistent, well-engineered object-oriented designs.
An Evaluation of Model-Based Approaches to Sensor Data Compression
(2013)

As the volumes of sensor data being accumulated are likely to soar, data compression has become essential in a wide range of sensor-data applications. This has led to a plethora of data compression techniques for sensor data, in particular model-based approaches have been spotlighted due to their significant compression performance. These methods, however, have never been compared and analyzed under the same setting, rendering a "right" choice of compression technique for a particular application very difficult. Addressing this problem, this paper presents a benchmark that offers a comprehensive empirical study on the performance comparison of the model-based compression techniques. Specifically, we reimplemented several state-of-the-art methods in a comparable manner, and measured various performance factors with our benchmark, including compression ratio, computation time, model maintenance cost, approximation quality, and robustness to noisy data. We then provide in-depth analysis of the benchmark results, obtained by using 11 different real data sets consisting of 346 heterogeneous sensor data signals. We believe that the findings from the benchmark will be able to serve as a practical guideline for applications that need to compress sensor data.
A TOR-based anonymous communication approach to secure smart home appliances
(2015)

Digital information has become a social infrastructure and with the expansion of the Internet, network infrastructure has become an indispensable part of social life and industrial activity for mankind. The idea of using existing electronics in smart home appliances and connecting them to the Internet is a new dimension along which technologies continue to grow, and in recent years mankind has witnessed an upsurge of usage of devices such as smart phone, smart television, home health-care device, smart LED light bulbs system, etc. Their build-in internet-controlled function has made them quite attractive to many segments of consumers and smart phone has become a common gadget for social networking. There are, however, serious challenges which need to be addressed as these tiny devices are designed for specific functions and lack processing capacity required for most security software. This research explores how these internet-enabled smart devices can be turned into very dangerous spots for distributed attacks purposes by cybercriminals for various ill intensions in a pinpointed manner. It then introduces a new approach to deal with such problems by taking advantage of the anonymous communication of the Onion Router (hereafter: TOR). It compares pros and cons of using anonymous communication scheme and justifies it be an efficient countermeasure to most attack scenarios.
A Fully Integrated Digital LDO With Coarse–Fine-Tuning and Burst-Mode Operation
(2016)

The digital low dropout regulator (D-LDO) has drawn significant attention recently for its low-voltage operation and process scalability. However, the tradeoff between current efficiency and transient response speed has limited its applications. In this brief, a coarse-fine-tuning technique with burst-mode operation is proposed to the D-LDO. Once the voltage undershoot/ overshoot is detected, the coarse tuning quickly finds out the coarse control word in which the load current should be located, with large power MOS strength and high sampling frequency for a fixed time. Then, the fine-tuning, with reduced power MOS strength and sampling frequency, regulates the D-LDO to the desired output voltage and takes over the steady-state operation for high accuracy and current efficiency. The proposed D-LDO is verified in a 65-nm CMOS process with a 0.01-mm2 active area. The measured voltage undershoot and overshoot are 55 and 47 mV, respectively, with load steps of 2 to 100 mA with a 20-ns edge time. The quiescent current is 82 μA, with a 0.43-ps figure of merit achieved. Moreover, the reference tracking speed is 1.5 V/μs.
A comprehensive introduction to differential geometry
(2007)

Spivak's Comprehensive introduction takes as its theme the classical roots of contemporary differential geometry. Spivak explains his Main Premise (my term) as follows: "in order for an introduction to differential geometry to expose the geometric aspect of the subject, an historical approach is necessary; there is no point in introducing the curvature tensor without explaining how it was invented and what it has to do with curvature". His second premise concerns the manner in which the historical material should be presented: "it is absurdly inefficient to eschew the modern language of manifolds, bundles, forms, etc., which was developed precisely in order to rigorize the concepts of classical differential geometry". Here, Spivak is addressing "a dilemma which confronts anyone intent on penetrating the mysteries of differential geometry". On the one hand, the subject is an old one, dating, as we know it, from the works of Gauss and Riemann, and possessing a rich classical literature. On the other hand, the rigorous and systematic formulations in current use were established relatively recently, after topological techniques had been sufficiently well developed to provide a base for an abstract global theory; the coordinate-free geometric methods of E. Cartan were also a major source. Furthermore, the viewpoint of global structure theory now dominates the subject, whereas differential geometers were traditionally more concerned with the local study of geometric objects. Thus it is possible and not uncommon for a modern geometric education to leave the subject's classical origins obscure. Such an approach can offer the great advantages of elegance, efficiency, and direct access to the most active areas of modern research. At the same time, it may strike the student as being frustratingly incomplete. As Spivak remarks, "ignorance of the roots of the subject has its price-no one denies that modern formulations are clear, elegant and precise; it's just that it's impossible to comprehend how any one ever thought of them." While Spivak's impulse to mediate between the past and the present is a natural one and is by no means unique, his undertaking is remarkable for its ambitious scope. Acting on its second premise, the Comprehensive introduction opens with an introduction to differentiable manifolds; the remaining four volumes are devoted to a geometric odyssey which starts with Gauss and Riemann, and ends with the Gauss-Bonnet-Chern Theorem and characteristic classes. A formidable assortment of topics is included along the way, in which we may distinguish several major historical themes: In the first place, the origins of fundamental geometric concepts are investigated carefully. As just one example, Riemannian sectional curvature is introduced by a translation and close exposition of the text of Riemann's remarkable paper, Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde
Autonomy and Reliability of Continuous Active Learning for Technology-Assisted Review
(2015)

We enhance the autonomy of the continuous active learning method shown by Cormack and Grossman (SIGIR 2014) to be effective for technology-assisted review, in which documents from a collection are retrieved and reviewed, using relevance feedback, until substantially all of the relevant documents have been reviewed. Autonomy is enhanced through the elimination of topic-specific and dataset-specific tuning parameters, so that the sole input required by the user is, at the outset, a short query, topic description, or single relevant document; and, throughout the review, ongoing relevance assessments of the retrieved documents. We show that our enhancements consistently yield superior results to Cormack and Grossman’s version of continuous active learning, and other methods, not only on average, but on the vast majority of topics from four separate sets of tasks: the legal datasets examined by Cormack and Grossman, the Reuters RCV1-v2 subject categories, the TREC 6 AdHoc task, and the construction of the TREC 2002 filtering test collection.
06-025 Multi-agent reinforcement learning : A survey ∗
(2006)

Multi-agent systems are rapidly finding applications in a variety of domains, including robotics, distributed control, telecommunications, economics. Many tasks arising in these domains require that the agents learn behaviors online. A significant part of the research on multi-agent learning concerns reinforcement learning techniques. However, due to different viewpoints on central issues, such as the formal statement of the learning goal, a large number of different methods and approaches have been introduced. In this paper we aim to present an integrated survey of the field. First, the issue of the multi-agent learning goal is discussed, after which a representative selection of algorithms is reviewed. Finally, open issues are identified and future research directions are outlined. Keywords—multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning, game theory, distributed control
FilterReg: Robust and Efficient Probabilistic Point-Set Registration using Gaussian Filter and Twist Parameterization
(2018)

Probabilistic point-set registration methods have been gaining more attention for their robustness to noise, outliers and occlusions. However, these methods tend to be much slower than the popular iterative closest point (ICP) algorithms, which severely limits their usability. In this paper, we contribute a novel probabilistic registration method that achieves state-of-the-art robustness as well as substantially faster computational performance than modern ICP implementations. This is achieved using a rigorous yet computationally-efficient probabilistic formulation. Pointset registration is cast as a maximum likelihood estimation and solved using the EM algorithm. We show that with a simple augmentation, the E step can be formulated as a filtering problem, allowing us to leverage advances in efficient Gaussian filtering methods. We also propose a customized permutohedral filter [1] for improved efficiency while retaining sufficient accuracy for our task. Additionally, we present a simple and efficient twist parameterization that generalizes our method to the registration of articulated and deformable objects. For articulated objects, the complexity of our method is almost independent of the Degrees Of Freedom (DOFs), which makes it highly efficient even for high DOF systems. The results demonstrate the proposed method consistently outperforms many competitive baselines on a variety of registration tasks. The video demo and source code are available on our project page.
Taxonomy for description of cross-domain attacks on CPS
(2013)

The pervasiveness of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in various aspects of the modern society grows rapidly. This makes CPS to increasingly attractive targets for various kinds of attacks. We consider cyber-security as an integral part of CPS security. Additionally, the necessity exists to investigate the CPS-specific aspects which are out of scope of cyber-security. Most importantly, attacks capable to cross the cyber-physical domain boundary should be analyzed. The vulnerability of CPS to such cross-domain attacks has been practically proven by numerous examples, e.g., by the currently most famous Stuxnet attack. In this paper, we propose taxonomy for description of attacks on CPS. The proposed taxonomy is capable of representing both conventional cyber-attacks as well as cross-domain attacks on CPS. Furthermore, based on the proposed taxonomy, we define the attack categorization. Several possible application areas of the proposed taxonomy are extensively discussed. Among others, it can be used to establish a knowledge base about attacks on CPS known in the literature. Furthermore, the proposed description structure will foster the quantitative and qualitative analysis of these attacks, both of which are necessarily to improve CPS security.
Automated 3-D Segmentation of Lungs With Lung Cancer in CT Data Using a Novel Robust Active Shape Model Approach
(2012)

Segmentation of lungs with (large) lung cancer regions is a nontrivial problem. We present a new fully automated approach for segmentation of lungs with such high-density pathologies. Our method consists of two main processing steps. First, a novel robust active shape model (RASM) matching method is utilized to roughly segment the outline of the lungs. The initial position of the RASM is found by means of a rib cage detection method. Second, an optimal surface finding approach is utilized to further adapt the initial segmentation result to the lung. Left and right lungs are segmented individually. An evaluation on 30 data sets with 40 abnormal (lung cancer) and 20 normal left/right lungs resulted in an average Dice coefficient of 0.975±0.006 and a mean absolute surface distance error of 0.84±0.23 mm, respectively. Experiments on the same 30 data sets showed that our methods delivered statistically significant better segmentation results, compared to two commercially available lung segmentation approaches. In addition, our RASM approach is generally applicable and suitable for large shape models.
Detecting Code-Switching between Turkish-English Language Pair
(2018)

Code-switching (usage of different languages within a single conversation context in an alternative manner) is a highly increasing phenomenon in social media and colloquial usage which poses different challenges for natural language processing. This paper introduces the first study for the detection of TurkishEnglish code-switching and also a small test data collected from social media in order to smooth the way for further studies. The proposed system using character level n-grams and conditional random fields (CRFs) obtains 95.6% micro-averaged F1-score on the introduced test data set.
Daily Mindful Responding Mediates the Effect of Meditation Practice on Stress and Mood: The Role of Practice Duration and Adherence.
(2018)

OBJECTIVE
Although meditation practice is an important component of many mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs), empirical findings of its effects on psychological functioning are mixed and the mechanisms for the effects remain unclear. Responding with mindfulness (i.e., returning one's attention back to a nonjudgmental, present-oriented awareness) is a fundamental skill practiced in meditations. With repeated meditation practice, this skill is thought to become internalized and be applied to one's daily life. We thus hypothesized that the extent to which individuals responded to daily events with mindfulness would mediate the effects of meditation practice (instance, duration, and adherence to instructions) on psychological well-being.


METHOD
Using a daily diary methodology, we tracked the meditation practice, use of mindful responding during the day, and psychological outcomes (perceived stress, negative and positive affect) of 117 mindfulness-based stress reduction program participants.


RESULTS
We found that on days when participants meditated, they responded with greater mindfulness to daily events, which accounted for the beneficial effects of meditating on psychological outcomes. Furthermore, findings suggest that on meditation days, longer and more closely adhered meditation practices were independently associated with increases in mindful responding, which in turn were associated with better psychological outcomes.


CONCLUSION
These results suggest that regular, longer, and more closely adhered meditation practice is an important component of MBIs, in part because it leads to responding more mindfully in daily life, which promotes well-being.
Social Norms and Community Enforcement
(2007)

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Motion estimation with non-local total variation regularization
(2010)

State-of-the-art motion estimation algorithms suffer from three major problems: Poorly textured regions, occlusions and small scale image structures. Based on the Gestalt principles of grouping we propose to incorporate a low level image segmentation process in order to tackle these problems. Our new motion estimation algorithm is based on non-local total variation regularization which allows us to integrate the low level image segmentation process in a unified variational framework. Numerical results on the Mid-dlebury optical flow benchmark data set demonstrate that we can cope with the aforementioned problems.
BFSPMiner: an effective and efficient batch-free algorithm for mining sequential patterns over data streams
(2017)

Supporting sequential pattern mining from data streams is nowadays a relevant problem in the area of data stream mining research. Actual proposals available in the literature are based on the well-known PrefixSpan approach and are, indeed, able to effectively bound the error of discovered patterns. This approach foresees the idea of dividing the target stream in a collection of manageable chunks, i.e., pieces of stream, in order to gain into effectiveness and efficiency. Unfortunately, mining patterns from stream chunks indeed introduce additional errors with respect to the basic application scenario where the target stream is mined continuously, in a non-batch manner. This is due to several reasons. First, since batches are processed individually, patterns that contain items from two consecutive batches are lost. Secondly, in most batch-based approaches, the decision about the frequency of a pattern is done locally inside a single batch. Thus, if a pattern is frequent in the stream but its items are scattered over different batches, it will be continuously pruned out and will never become frequent due to the algorithm’s lack of the “complete-picture” perspective. In order to address so-delineated pattern mining problems, this paper introduces and experimentally assesses BFSPMiner, a Batch-Free Sequential Pattern Miner algorithm for effectively and efficiently mining patterns in streams without being constrained to the traditional batch-based processing. This allows us, for instance, to discover frequent patterns that would be lost according to alternative batch-based stream mining processing models. We complement our analytical contributions by means of a comprehensive experimental campaign of BFSPMiner against real-world data stream sets and in comparison with current batch-based stream sequential pattern mining algorithms.
Treatment of keloids and hypertrophic scars.
(2005)

Clinicians always find it difficult to treat hypertrophic scars and keloids. Various treatment modalities are available. Intralesional corticosteroids, topical applications, cryotherapy, surgery, laser therapy, and silicone sheeting are the widely used options. Radiation therapy can also help in cases of recalcitrant keloids. Most recently, pulsed-dye laser has been successfully used to treat keloids and hypertrophic scars. There are no set guidelines for the treatment of keloids. Treatment has to be individualized depending upon the distribution, size, thickness, and consistency of the lesions and association of inflammation. A combination approach to therapy seems to be the best option.